“Welcome everybody to Utopia Skyways,” beams the stewardess in a retro pillbox
hat as we settle into the bus for our magical mystery tour, “and have a nice
life offworld.”

From the moment we got out at Canary Wharf tube station, it was clear we
weren’t in Kansas – sorry, London – anymore. Nor even in our usual
time-zone. Neo-fascist guards patrolled the area in visors and black body
armour. Stepford Wife hostesses with clipboards signed us all in. And still
we had no idea what we were doing here.

This is Secret Cinema, a club that
requires a supreme act of faith: you pay £23.50 to see some old movie
(you’re not told what), somewhere (you’re not told where). But already it
has 65,000 converts on its mailing list. Eight screenings have been
organised for this week in mid-June, at nearly a thousand people a time.
Judging from Tweets, blogs and Facebook updates, the reaction is almost
universally ecstatic.

Suddenly the bus makes an unscheduled stop. A man in a trench coat barges on,
waving a badge: “There’s been an uprising in the offworld colonies due to
bio-engineered humanoids,” he announces grimly. “Close the curtains. I said
close the curtains! Now, you sir, yes you – you’ll need to answer this
Voight-Kampff questionnaire.”

Aha! Isn’t that the test used in Ridley Scott’s future noir classic, Blade
Runner, to distinguish replicants from humans? So that’s what we’re
going to see!

The bus disgorges us in a blighted urban wasteland of burned out cars and
feral vagrants. We file wonderingly through a maze of alleyways, hectored by
guards, until we enter an unprepossessing-looking warehouse... and a brave
new world. Oriental noodle bars are packed next to eye-replacement clinics.
A tall blonde in suspenders and laddered tights pushes past, a stripe of
black paint hooding her eyes. A blade runner hurries close behind, coat
tails flapping, gun drawn.

Two dancing girls gyrate from a podium, beckoning punters into a nightclub
where a band play decked out in shiny blue robes. Outside, street youths
jump on car roofs and tangle with the law.

This is as close to the dystopian Los Angeles of 2019 envisioned by Ridley
Scott as you’re ever likely to get. A hundred carpenters, set designers and
painters were needed to make it reality. Sixty professional actors and 40
local schoolkids bring it to life. Previous Secret Cinemas have brought us a
real chorus-line and shaving foam fight for Bugsy Malone, and a
recreation of Coney Island in London Fields for The Warriors, but
this is by far the biggest one yet.

“It is insanely ambitious!” agrees Secret Cinema’s founder Fabien Riggall when
I catch up with him later. “But I’ve just got this goal to do this. I’m so
passionate about the power of cinema. And I believe audiences should not be
put on conveyor belts, they should get involved. Eighty per cent of people
going to Secret Cinema dress up, they become part of the action.”

It’s true, it can be hard to tell who’s an audience member and who’s an actor.
One night some actors started a fake fight, and a punter joined in for real.

As ambitious as the Blade Runner nights are, Riggall is already thinking
bigger and better. He’d like to do runs of a month, and is getting interest
in franchising the idea abroad. He might run the same event simultaneously
in various cities, getting the audiences to interact with each other
somehow. He may have to raise the price a little but, he points out, “In the
West End you can pay £40 or £50 for a theatre ticket. And we’re having to
build the theatre from scratch each time.”

Back in futuristic-LA-by-way-of-Docklands, it’s nearly three hours before we
are ushered into a second warehouse for the screening itself. After such a
build-up, it’s almost an anticlimax: a film I’ve seen half a dozen times
before, but this time with dodgy sound on bum-numbing plastic seats. Even a
spectacular aerial recreation by actors of the climactic rooftop struggle
between Deckard and the replicant leader seems gimmicky. Where’s the
audience involvement now?

But hush. It’s a small criticism of a great night. As Rutger Hauer says in the
film, “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe...”